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Rape Culture And Stereotypes

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Common phrases college students toss around during their time spent on campus are “freshman 15”, “syllabus week”, or “rape culture”. Culture is understood to be something that people engage in together as a society. Rape culture is when people of a society excuse or tolerate sexual violence. It is when sexual assault, rape, and harassment are ignored, belittled, normalized, or made into jokes. Rape Culture is when pop music tells women “you know you want it” because of these “blurred lines” (Thicke), when society supports athletes who are charged with rape and then calling their victims career-destroyers, when companies create advertisements using women in order to promote business, when people believe that girls allow themselves to be raped, …show more content…

He is found not responsible on all four accounts. “The investigators find that [he] may have interpreted [her] actions as consent,” was what had been stated in the report. Cassie’s actions, her silence and passivity, her frozen trauma state, may have been interpreted as consent. Yet, included in the very same email she received was an attachment to the University’s detailed Policies and Procedures on “Harassment, Discrimination, Sexual and Relationship Misconduct”. Here in this document under the section of effective consent are two lines: “Consent cannot be implied through acceptance of an invitation,” and, “Silence and passivity cannot be interpreted as an indication of consent” (Harassment). Implied. Interpreted. Yet, these are the exact grounds on which the Office of Equity and Inclusion based their decision. Not to mention, Cassie never said a single “yes” to anything and was never actively engaged with anything going on. To the Office of Equity and Inclusion at Creighton University, her no’s meant nothing. Cassie decided to write an …show more content…

Rape culture extends across the globe. In 2012, a group of men gang-raped a young woman and assaulted her friend aboard a moving bus in New Delhi, India. The crime was horrific. And yet, there were some within the country who chose to blame the victims instead of the perpetrators. Asaram Bapu, a self-realized saint from India with approximately 40 million disciples said, “The victim’s daughter is as guilty as her rapists…She should have called the culprits brothers and begged before them to stop…This could have saved her dignity and life. Can you clap with one hand? I don’t think so” (Herald). Then in 1995, during the Bosnian War and the Bosnian genocide, the violence assumed a gender-targeted form through the use of rape. It is estimated that 50,000 women were raped. A year prior during the Rwandan genocide, known as the 100-day genocide, it is estimated that 500,000 women were raped. During the times when these genocides were taking place, rape and sexual violence was seen as just another part of war, but not seen as a crime. Thousands and thousands of women were raped and will never obtain the justice they deserve for their perpetrators’

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